Supporters of the late Minneapolis author Robert Pirsig will kick off a motorcycle ride from Minneapolis to San Francisco on Monday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pirsig’s best-selling book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.”

Registration to join the ride has closed, but the public is invited to join a free kick-off event from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis, where Pirsig was vice-president and served on the board of directors from 1973 to 1975.

Robert Pirsig, author of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” photographed April 17, 1974. Pirsig wrote the book after the 1968 cross-country motorcycle trip he and his 11-year-old son, Chris, made from St. Paul to San Francisco. (Craig Borck / Pioneer Press)

Sponsored by the nonprofit Robert Pirsig Association, it will feature speakers Mark Richardson, author of “Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” and the association’s co-chair Ian Glendinning. Advance registration is available online at robertpirsig.org.

Pirsig, who graduated high school at 14, went on to study biochemistry at the University of Minnesota. He enlisted in the Army in 1946 and spent two years stationed in South Korea. After he was discharged, he moved to Seattle before returning to the University of Minnesota, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1950. He went on to study philosophy at Banaras Hindu University in India and the Committee on the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods at the University of Chicago. In 1958, he earned a master’s degree in journalism and taught at Montana State University and the University of Illinois.

In 1968, Pirsig and his son Chris took a 17-day journey by motorcycle from Minnesota to California, which inspired him to write a fictionalized version of the trip in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” He spent four years writing the book while living above a south Minneapolis shoe store and working as a tech writer for Honeywell. He punctuated the narrative with various philosophical discussions on topics including epistemology, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science.

After receiving 121 rejections, an editor finally agreed to publish the book, despite thinking it would not be profitable. It went on to sell 50,000 copies in the first three months and more than 5 million copies in the decades since. It stands as the best-selling philosophy book in the United States.

In a contemporary review, a critic for the New York Times wrote: “I now regret that I lack the expertise in philosophy to put Mr. Pirsig’s ideas to a proper test, for this book may very well be a profoundly important one — a great one even — full of insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas. I just don’t know. But whatever its true philosophical worth, it is intellectual entertainment of the highest order.”

After the publication of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to write the follow-up “Lila: An Inquiry into Morals.”

Pirsig died aged 88 at his home in Maine in 2017 after a period of failing health. Two years later, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History acquired the 1966 Honda CB77 Super Hawk he drove on the 1968 ride with his son.

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